“Professor Lockdown”: a model we shouldn’t follow?
“It feels a lifetime ago,” but it has only been two months since the PM made the fateful decision to shut Britain down, said Karren Brady in The Sun. Overnight, we were asked to make changes to our lives so extreme, they “initially seemed unimaginable”. We complied, because we were told that by cutting ourselves off from our friends and loved ones, we were helping to save lives. Yet last week, it emerged that the epidemiologist who had spent the past seven weeks pushing this message had felt no such compunction: at least twice during the lockdown, Professor Neil Ferguson had been visited at home by his married lover. Reportedly, she was actually in the room when he was being interviewed on Radio 4’s programme about the importance of the lockdown measures. Ferguson claimed that as he had recently had Covid-19, he thought he was immune; but even if he was – and it remains far from certain that being infected confers immunity – by inviting her into his home, he was putting her at risk, along with her husband, with whom she is reportedly in an open relationship. But the main principle here is one of public trust. If Ferguson didn’t think “meeting his lover for a quickie” was a problem, what is the lockdown for? If he doesn’t believe in his advice, why should we?
Today
I have some sympathy with Ferguson, said Kate Maltby in the I newspaper. As “the face of the lockdown”, he has become “a hate figure” for members of the libertarian Right, who took a delighted interest in the more prurient aspects of this story. And like other scientists, propelled into the public eye by their role in this crisis, he will be unused to this kind of scrutiny. It’s no coincidence that the news about his lover’s visits was broken by The Daily Telegraph, which has made plain its distrust of his statistical models. Owing to the confidentiality that cloaks the Government’s work, it is unable to find scientists who are “both privy to the Government’s information, and free to attack government policy”. But it “can dig about” and hope to find “Professor Lockdown” breaking his own rules. Still, he was right to resign. If you make an enemy of a section of the press, it’s best not to give them any ammunition with which to reasonably discredit you – and “flagrant hypocrisy” will do that.
“So the professor is gone, felled by a risk-taking character streak and an overactive libido,” said Paul Nuki in The Daily Telegraph. Some of us will have felt a degree of “there but for the grace of
God” queasiness over the episode. But the question now is, what will change? And the answer, according to most of his colleagues, is not much. Ferguson will go back to his team at Imperial; and the Government’s Sage committee will keep studying his modelling, as “carefully and dispassionately as it always has”. But what will be missing is Ferguson’s “combatant personality” – something that will leave a “terrible gap in Sage, a body already packed just shy of half full of government salaried officials”. In Whitehall, they regard him as the boy who cried wolf, because his modelling of the 2009 swine flu pandemic wrongly predicted tens of thousands of deaths. But the independent review of the UK response pointed out that the Imperial team had warned ministers that the data was insufficient to give accurate results. Two years later, Ferguson was back in the fray, battling to get the UK pandemic strategy altered, so that it “would be centred on South Koreanstyle “suppression” – the idea that the virus should be stopped in its tracks at the start. The great “swordsman” lost that cause at the time, but it was thanks to him that the Government finally pivoted to the strategy in March – in time to save lives, but too
late for the UK economy.
“If you make an enemy of the press, it’s best not to give them ammunition
with which to discredit you”
Let’s get one thing straight, said Fraser Nelson in the same paper. Ferguson never sought to have so much power over our lives: he was asked for his advice, he gave it, and – with little time for thought or analysis – the Government chose to follow it. He can’t be blamed for that; but given that we now have the highest death toll in Europe, it’s fair to ask what the lockdown strategy has achieved, and the accuracy of the data that underpins it, not for the purpose of recrimination, but to get a sense of where to go from here. The trouble with Covid-19 is that we know very little about it, said Matt Ridley in The Spectator. Is it transmitted mainly by breath or by touching? Can children pass it on? Why are obese people at particular risk? Will there be a second wave? We do not have answers to these and other vital questions. The Imperial team had to base their model on assumptions about the virus’s reproductive rate, and the proportion of infected people who would die of it – assumptions that may prove to have been wildly off the mark. What we need now is not more models, but more data, about where infections are being acquired and how they are spreading. Only then will we know which parts of the lockdown are necessary, and which are futile.